The late Charlie Trotter redefined how America eats. When he closed his legendary Chicago restaurant last year, Jay McInerney was there.

Not long after Charlie Trotter received the James Beard Foundation's Humanitarian of the Year Award, at the foundation's 25th anniversary celebration at Lincoln Center this spring, he was approached backstage by the editor of a culinary magazine, an attractive, importunate woman who wanted to enlist him for a big food festival.

"What do you pay?" Trotter asked.

"Well, we don't really pay, Charlie," she said. She was flirting a little; she's known Trotter for years and she's very cute and an important person in the food world.

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"Why should I donate my time to a for-profit organization?" he asked.

"Well, you know, it's about giving back to the community, and helping the young chefs."

"Fuck the young chefs," Trotter said. "They can read one of my 17 books."

It's hard to imagine a more undiplomatic brush-off, but Charlie Trotter didn't become famous for his manners. Even in an industry that spawned Gordon Ramsay, Trotter is renowned for his temper. But in his native Chicago, and in the culinary world, he is also celebrated for his extraordinary generosity and his almost promiscuous philanthropy. He could have mentioned to her that as far as helping young chefs goes, he's raised more than $3 million to send young people to culinary school. He's raised millions more for inner city schools, cultural organizations, and medical charities. When my wife, who had met him just a few months earlier, at Alain Ducasse's 55th birthday party, solicited an auction item for the Alzheimer's Foundation, he responded with a five-figure check. He's a hardass with a heart of gold. And that doesn't begin to describe his contradictions.

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Moments after the chef dismisses the editor, the official media escort for the Beard Awards asks him to pose for pictures and conduct interviews, and he acquiesces only after being assured that someone will go out and find his wife Rochelle and bring her back to the press room. An African-American beauty, she repeatedly rebuffed his advances after he first met her at a charity food and wine event in Minneapolis 12 years ago. She eventually succumbed to his relentless courtship, and they've been together since 2002 (they watched the Twin Towers fall from a runway at LaGuardia while traveling together on business, not long before their first date), though watching the couple you get the feeling that the chef isn't taking his good luck for granted. For the next half hour he is admirably patient and genial with the photographers and journalists, even as he expresses concern to his handlers about his wife's whereabouts.

"I'm really not that comfortable with people," Trotter tells me during a brief moment of respite in the crush of food industry insiders at Avery Fisher Hall. "I mean, I love individuals, but I'm not very social." Within a few minutes he's chatting amiably with his friend Norman Van Aken, the Miami chef who was one of his first employers. Big gatherings and small talk may not be among Trotter's favorite things, but he shakes hands for an hour or so, accepting congratulations for the award — and condolences for his upcoming retirement, at the age of 52. His eponymous Chicago restaurant is closing on August 31, 25 years after it ushered in a new era in American fine dining.

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Many of us didn't know what a tasting menu was when we first sat down in the dining room in the circa 1908 townhouse that is the Lincoln Park home of Charlie Trotter's. I was blown away in 1996 when the food kept coming out, small plates of the most inventive and delicious dishes I'd ever experienced. I'd had a taste of haute cuisine at Taillevent in Paris, and I'd experienced Daniel Boulud's gorgeous interpretations of rustic French classics at his restaurant in New York, but for all his mastery of French technique Trotter seemed to be opening up new American frontiers in gastronomy. Of particular interest were the vegetables, which were treated with rare reverence. There was even an all-vegetable tasting menu — a radical concept at the time. The other thing that struck me: I was with some mad oenophiles that night, and the sommelier consulted with the kitchen after we'd made our selection and reported back that the chef had adjusted his recipes after tasting the wine. I'd never heard of a chef who was willing to do this, and I'm not sure anyone else does it to this day. But Trotter has a deep reverence for wine and, despite his reputation as a tyrant, a flexibility of approach and a willingness to experiment on the fly. (The chef credits master sommelier Larry Stone with helping him understand the nuances of wine and food pairing, but his own improvisatory approach to cooking helped consummate thousands of pairings.)

I returned to Charlie Trotter's several times over the years and inevitably staggered out happy and sated. So when I heard that the restaurant was closing I immediately called to book a table, which turned out to be no easy feat, since thousands of other people from around the world had the same idea. When the day finally arrived, I flew to Chicago with my wife and another couple. As we pulled up at the restaurant, we saw among the fleets of Town Cars a yellow school bus pulling away from the curb, bearing a dozen students who had just enjoyed a degustation and a tour — beneficiaries of Trotter's Excellence Program, which brings inner city kids to the restaurant three times a week.

The Wiener Werkstätte — inspired dining room was more festive than I remembered, perhaps because the chef was emerging from the kitchen from time to time to greet his customers and shmooze, something that seldom happened in the old days. (One year he was voted second-meanest Chicagoan, after Michael Jordan, by a local magazine.) I was wondering if the food would impress me as much, after all these years during which I'd honed my palate and traveled around the world eating at the new culinary temples, like El Bulli and Noma and Alinea, the celebrated Chicago newcomer helmed by Trotter's former kitchen slave Grant Achatz. We were dining with a couple of peripatetic foodies, with whom we'd recently ventured to Copenhagen for the sole purpose of trying out the restaurant scene, and the wife, in particular, was skeptical. She'd heard the negative buzz, encapsulated in a snarky 2011 New York Times piece titled "Charlie Trotter, a Leader Left Behind."

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The marinated cuttlefish with ogo seaweed that started us off was starkly minimalist, delicious, and tender, the culinary equivalent of an actress with a great body in a G-string. The next dish, by contrast, sounded almost frighteningly baroque: an unagi terrine with grapefruit, red curry, and kaffir lime. And yet the flavors harmonized brilliantly. "Wow," said my friend, who would soon be jumping on a plane just to visit Fäviken, the latest foodie mecca, in a remote precinct of Sweden. "This isn't what I was expecting at all." She was apparently expecting something old-school, more traditional. Even better was the coriander-encrusted bobwhite quail with black sesame, watercress, and pomegranate. (I'm not sure whether the chef adjusted the seasoning in honor of the rather serious 1986 Henri Jayer Vosne-Romanée Beaumonts we'd ordered.) The kitchen seemed to be, well, smoking. I liked the rest of the meal so much that I returned a couple of weeks later, even though I live in New York, and I was if anything even more impressed the next time around.

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On this second occasion I share a table with Jim Gaby, a serious gourmand and Trotter groupie who has eaten at the restaurant more than 200 times, despite the fact that he lives in Washington, DC. "In all those visits," he says, "I've never had the same dish twice." A portly polymath who might just possibly be the reincarnation of A.J. Liebling, Gaby has an encyclopedic knowledge of wine and seems to remember every single meal he ever ate. When he turned 50 he set out on an odyssey to eat at the 50 best restaurants in the world, after getting a list from Trotter, who wrote letters on Gaby's behalf to each and every one of the chefs on the list. Gaby was in the room last New Year's Eve when Trotter announced he was closing, and he intends to be in the room for the last seven nights of service.

Trotter seems to inspire this kind of passionate devotion. Ray Harris, a New York investment banker, has eaten at Trotter's more than 400 times. Like Gaby, he has reserved a table for the last seven nights. Other notable diners include George Clooney, Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Gary Sinise, and any number of politicians and global dignitaries. Fellow chefs — including Daniel Boulud, Ferran Adri, and Thomas Keller — have been known to dine with Trotter here.

To start, we need to order some wine for the current feast, including several bottles from Gaby's personal stash in the Trotter cellar, which includes 2,000 selections and runs to about 10,000 bottles. (A few of Trotter's highlights: a magnum of 1945 Romanée-Conti, which just sold for $46,000; some 1845 Château d'Yquem; 1870 Château Lafite; nine double magnums of Gaja Barbaresco.) "Five bottles," Gaby says, after making his selections. "Two and a half bottles each. That sounds about right, don't you think?" Five hours and 13 exhilarating courses later, I'm ready to surrender, but Gaby is happily anticipating dessert and perhaps a digestif as I stagger out the door.

Trotter's first experience of fine dining came the night of his junior prom, at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1977, when he took his date to a Chicago restaurant called the Bakery, which was presided over by a legendary Hungarian chef, Louis Szathmáry. "He was the real deal: big belly, big chef's hat," Trotter tells me. "He asked us, 'How's the food? How's the service? If it's not great I'll fire the waiter.' Then he asked, 'How was the champagne?' I told him we weren't old enough to drink, and he said, 'Well, I am!' and ordered us a bottle. I just had this kind of fine dining epiphany. I thought, this is so cool."

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His first restaurant job, at 12, was as a dishwasher at Curt's Diner in Willamette. In high school he worked as a busboy at the Ground Round. "I loved it," he says. "Thought it was a great job. I would try to sweep up the peanut shells, but the manager told me not to, that it was part of the ambience." While at the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in poli-sci, he worked as a waiter and a bartender; his roommate loved to cook, and they would compete to see who could make the best meals.

"When I graduated I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," Trotter says, "but I knew I didn't want a conventional career." He went to work at Sinclair's, in Lake Forest, under a young chef named Norman Van Aken. "I liked cooking. It was simultaneously physical and cerebral. You're on your feet and you're thinking." He stayed six months and left when he felt there was no more to learn. Remarkably, it would be his longest stint in any kitchen. He was drawn to California, the epicenter of a new wave of American cooking spearheaded by Alice Waters, though he was unable to talk his way into the kitchen at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley. He found work at several restaurants across the bay, including Campton Place. "I showed up at 10 in the morning for my 4 p.m. shift. I stayed till I learned what there was to learn. My mind-set was, if when I leave they don't have to hire two people to replace me, then I've failed."

He spent just one week at the Quilted Giraffe, Barry Wine's groundbreaking New York restaurant, but he was very much impressed by what he saw there, and some would later see his eponymous Chicago restaurant as the successor to that institution. He then spent six months in France, "eating and soaking up the ethic and the aesthetic."

His great epiphany took place when he visited Frédy Girardet's eponymous three-star restaurant in Crissier, Switzerland. "Every element was perfect. All the elements added up to more than the sum of its parts. Suddenly I had a vision of what I wanted to do," he says. After just a few meals at Girardet, Charlie Trotter's, which he opened in 1987 with the help of his entrepreneur father, Robert Trotter, seems to have sprung fully formed, like Athena, from his head. His subsequent career would mirror that of the great chef in many ways. Like Girardet, and unlike most star chefs of the present generation, Trotter stayed close to his kitchen in Lincoln Park, despite a few attempts to franchise his brand and a brief foray in Vegas. He was invited to open in Manhattan's Time Warner Center, alongside Thomas Keller's Per Se, but he pulled out.

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Some chefs make their name with a signature dish or a series of dishes that are reproduced note for note, like symphonies, over the years. Joël Robuchon is perhaps the ultimate example. But Trotter is more of a jazz man, which is why his longtime customers can say they've never had the same dish twice. Again, he credits Girardet as the inspiration. "Frédy had more of an organic approach," he says. "And that's more me. I like that style. It's like Miles Davis. He never played 'Stella by Starlight' the same way. You're more on a high wire. I like that style. David Bouley is like that. He's in the moment." Another contradiction to add to the list: the control freak who loves to improvise.

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How Trotter became such a master culinary technician on the basis of such a spotty and restless apprenticeship is a bit of a mystery, but he is clearly a fast learner, despite, or perhaps because of, a serious case of dyslexia. In college he had to take a year off just to catch up with his required reading, yet reading remains one of his greatest passions. His favorite authors are Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and Nietzsche. (Ah, yes, of course! Nietzsche!) He's a self-described perfectionist who doesn't mind demanding perfection from his employees. At a lunch at his townhouse, near the restaurant, attended by such Chicago luminaries as novelist Scott Turow and broadcaster Bill Kurtis, Trotter introduced his kitchen assistants and asked each in turn, "Is excellence possible?" Anyone who wants to know how scary it might be to work in Trotter's kitchen can read Grant Achatz's Life, on the Line.

Achatz shared the stage at Lincoln Center this year with his former boss, as he was inducted into the Beard Foundation's Who's Who (Trotter was inducted in 1996) and accepted the best new restaurant award for Next, bearing the legacy of Chicago as a great culinary capital into the future. It's Charlie Trotter's legacy, an unlikely story in many ways, and one to which he may yet contribute another chapter. "One of his legacies will be all his employees who moved on to open their own restaurants," Ray Harris says. Some have moved east or west (like David Myers), but of Trotter's Chicago-based protégés, Harris cites Matthias Merges, of Yusho; Giuseppe Tentori, of Boka and GT Fish & Oyster; and Graham Elliot, of Graham Elliot.

On Friday, August 31, after 25 years, Charlie Trotter will close the doors of his restaurant, still going strong with two Michelin stars. (Many believe that's one star less than it deserves.) In January he starts graduate study in philosophy at the University of Chicago, a daunting prospect for a middle-aged dyslexic. Given his Nietzschean drive, I have little doubt that he will thrive in this new endeavor. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out a return to cooking. Trotter has no plans to sell the building that houses the restaurant, and, perhaps most tellingly, he told me he has no plan to sell the wine cellar, despite the almost frantic interest of several auction houses. It would take many, many years of Platonic symposia to make even a dent in that cellar. I'm hoping to get another crack at it as a paying customer in the not too distant future.

Perhaps the only person who's privy to Trotter's ultimate plan is his wife. At the Beard celebration, it seems that Rochelle may be the only person on earth whose opinion he fears. When they met, the minister's daughter was working as an executive for Yum! Brands and had a more impressive culinary education résumé than her future husband, having studied at the Ritz Escoffier cooking school in Paris. Despite a palpable lack of interest on her part, Trotter managed to get Rochelle's office address and sent her all of the books he'd written. When he called to see if she'd gotten his care package, she informed him she'd given the books away to her staff. When he later spotted her at the Aspen Food & Wine festival, he practically leaped from the table where he was autographing books to pursue her.

As the glad-handers continue to crowd around him — the foodies, the editors, the up-and-coming chefs, the Food Network operatives — Trotter becomes increasingly agitated, looking for an escape route, until he finally finds Rochelle. In the teeming lobby at Lincoln Center, she looks regal in a fitted red dress. He's relieved when they're finally able to slip away and return to their hotel. Early the next morning, they're on a plane to Chicago, and that afternoon Trotter is back presiding over his kitchen.